In MarchCommonweal ran an essay by Terry Eagleton titled "Culture & Barbarism." The essay began its life as one of four lectures given at Yale University in April 2008 -- they were that year's Terry Lectures. (As you might expect, Eagleton did not waste the coincidence of names. His first lecture, "The Scum of the Earth," begins: "Itwas, I felt, characteristic of the delightfully informal nature of American society that Ishould receive a letter from Yale inviting me to deliver the TerryLectures.I had of course long been accustomed to the instant-first-name character of U.S. culture, but this long-range intimacy nevertheless came as something of a surprise.") Last monthYale University PresspublishedEagleton's lecturesin a book titledReason, Faith, and Revolution.In his online New York Times column, "Think Again," Stanley Fish -- one of Eagleton's frequent targets -- offers a fairly sympathetic summary ofthe book'scomplicated argument. Fish is one of ourbest summarizers; he can distillmany pages of close argument into a few lucid and often memorable paragraphs. As here:
Science, says Eagleton, does not start far back enough; it can run its operations, but it cant tell you what they ultimately mean or provide a corrective to its own excesses. Likewise, reason is too skin deep a creed to tackle what is at stake; its laws the laws of entailment and evidence cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.
Ditchkins, [a hybrid of Hitchens and Dawkins -- mb] Eagleton observes, cannot ground his belief in the value of individual freedom in scientific observation. It is for him an article of faith, and once in place, it generates facts and reasons and judgments of right and wrong. Faith and knowledge, Eagleton concludes, are not antithetical but interwoven. You cant have one without the other, despite the Satanic claim that you can go it alone by applying your own independent intellect to an unmediated reality: All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior commitment. Meaning, value and truth are not reducible to the facts themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare account of them. Which is to say that there is no such thing as a bare account of them. (Here, as many have noted, is where religion and postmodernism meet.)
It must bedisconcerting toFish's manyopponentsto find that his restatement of their arguments is often more economical and elegant that their original formulations -- especially when he then goes on topull their arguments apart.Here, though, there is nocriticism of Eagleton's position. Indeed, there iseven a note of intellectual kinship at the end:
The book starts out witty and then gets angrier and angrier. (There is the possibility, of course, that the later chapters were written first; Im just talking about the temporal experience of reading it.) I spent some time trying to figure out why the anger was there and I came up with two explanations.One is given by Eagleton, and it is personal. Christianity may or may not be the faith he holds to (he doesnt tell us), but he speaks, he says, partly in defense of my own forbearers, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.
